Forbes columnist Steven Salzberg and author-investigator Joe Nickell will each be awarded the 2012 Robert P. Balles Prize in Critical Thinking, to be presented by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry at the CFI Summit in October.

From the Edge of Postcards: The Wem Ghost Photo

Following a fire in a small English town, a mysterious photo of the blaze-seemingly depicting a girl ghost-circulated around the world.

On
November 19, 1995, the town hall of the English market town of Wem burned,
leaving only a charred brick shell. Among the locals watching the building
burn was Tony O'Rahilly, who brought his camera and took several photos
of the blaze. A few months later, in March 1996, O'Rahilly developed
the photos of the fire in a little film studio he'd constructed in
a shed in the garden behind his home. The series of pictures showed
dramatic images of fire, light, and darkness. But one showed something
even more astonishing-a ghostly girl standing amid the flames (Topham,
n.d.).

O'Rahilly
sent the photos to the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous
Phenomena (ASSAP) for analysis. The ASSAP, which specializes in paranormal
investigations, assisted O'Rahilly by having Vernon Harrison, former
head of the Royal Photographic Society, examine the photos. Harrison
concluded, “The negative is a straight- forward piece of black-and-white
work and shows no sign of having been tampered with” (Laursen 2007).

The
ASSAP's conclusion was that the photo (see figure 1) showed
a simulacrum (a random, ambiguous image interpreted as meaningful) caused
by falling debris filmed during the fire. It did not appear to be a
hoax. However, this conclusion was called into question by the British
Broadcasting Company (BBC), which investigated the case for its television
show Out of this World, hosted by current Independent Television
(ITV) presenter Chris Choi.

Fig. 1

In
the BBC show, Choi interviewed O'Rahilly in his garden and also toured
the burned-out remnants of the town hall. The conventional story of
the ghostly photo was also told. But when the BBC took the photo to
the National Museum of Photography, Film, and Television (now known
as the National Media Museum), viewers learned a different story. Both
of the photography experts there, Paul Thompson and Will Stapp, agreed
that the photo showed signs of manipulation and double exposure. Thompson
in particular noted that he saw horizontal scan lines, as though the
image consisted of a photo of a face on a video screen pasted into the
picture of the fire. With that damning revelation, Choi returned to
confront O'Rahilly, who responded, “No way ... It's none of my
doing.”

I
first became interested in investigating this case in September 2009.
At that time, the allegations of the Out of this World show were
not widely available on the Internet. As is usual in the echo chamber
of ghost literature, the ghost stories rang loud and clear while the
facts lay quietly subdued out in the back shed. I came across the BBC
piece online and found it very interesting. A check of the ASSAP's
website showed that they still felt the case was one of pareidolia instead
of hoaxing. I found that intriguing and asked them why; they replied
that the photo they'd provided to the BBC during the television investigation
had been a duplicate, and in their opinion the “scan lines” observed
by Paul Thompson had been the result of duplication, not hoaxing.

Trying
to find a more pristine copy of the photograph to examine, I reached
out to Janet Bord at the Fortean Picture Library. She was able to provide
me with a high-resolution photo as well as a shot of the negative strip
from which it was produced. As the ASSAP had said, the original did
not have any scan lines. It showed a ghostly girl in the fire, but there
was no evidence of digital scan lines.

I
tried to contact Paul Thompson and Will Stapp. Both are still involved
in photography but are no longer working with the National Media Museum.
Neither Thompson nor Stapp responded to my inquires, and other photography
experts I approached were unwilling to opine on the matter.

To
be clear, I didn't think the photo showed a ghost-but I was deeply
curious to know whether O'Rahilly had photographed a piece of debris
with an uncanny resemblance to a girl or had deliberately faked the
photograph. I would have liked to have asked him, but he passed away
in 2005.

And
then the answer arrived in the morning mail. On Monday, May 17, 2010,
the Shropshire Star, the local paper serving Wem, ran a story
titled, “Does Postcard Solve Ghost Riddle?” The Star had
run a photo a few weeks earlier showing a postcard from 1922 of a street
in Wem (see figure 2). An alert reader named Brian Lear, a seventy-seven-year-old
grandfather, noticed that the girl pictured in the postcard (see figure
3) bore a strong resemblance to the famous ghost girl and alerted the
Star. In the May 17 article, the newspaper showed details from O'Rahilly's
photo and the postcard and agreed with Lear that the resemblance was
“striking” (Neal 2010).

Fig. 2

Fig. 3

Striking
may be an understatement. Rarely does such a clear explanation for a
ghost photo come to light. Rather than simply show both photos, I have
created an animation demonstrating that the two girls are indeed the
same photographic image: the one superimposed on the fire photograph
by O'Rahilly via a double exposure. On the blog of The Atlanta
Skeptics, my animated image of the girl on the postcard dynamically
fades in over the ghost photo; the alignments should also be apparent
from the still image shown in figure 4. The points of the girl's hat,
the eyes, the nose, the neckline, and the beltline align perfectly between
the two photos. O'Rahilly used this postcard image to make his ghost
photo. Details missing from the ghost photo-but appearing in the postcard-are
due to either the photographic process used to make the fake image or
to O'Rahilly cropping the postcard prior to shooting his double exposure.

Fig. 4

In
the years since the fire, Wem has come to embrace the ghost. The town's
history tells of a devastating fire back in 1677, allegedly caused by
a girl named Jane Churm. People have reported seeing the ghost of Jane
in the intervening years, usually carrying a candle (Karl 2007). It
is no surprise that many have claimed that the girl in the photo must
be Jane. After all, what's a ghost photo without a backstory? Even
the spot where the ghost was “photographed” had been adorned with
documentation of the paranormal event. Perhaps Wem's townsfolk should
move that bit of documentation over to the late O'Rahilly's shed?

It's
a pity that O'Rahilly died before this postcard came to light. He
got plenty of media coverage when the photo was released originally,
and now with the coverage of the explanation he could have enjoyed a
second wave of interest. Indeed, he would have gotten double the exposure. n

References

Karl, Jason.
2007. An Illustrated History of the Haunted World. London: New
Holland Publishers, Ltd.

Laursen,
Chris. 2007. In the doorway of a burning building. Available online
athttp://seminars.tor

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